No History, No Democracy!

My mother told me often to forget the past. A here-and-now Chicagoan, she used to chastise me about reading books about slavery, calling my teenage inquiries, morbid. My grandparents, both born in Louisiana, fled the South during Jim Crow but neither ever referred to Dr. King. By the way the two accepted his death as what comes to folks who protest, I suspect Hoover and his media allies influenced their views about activists, activism, protest, the whole Civil Rights era.

More recently, Americans have become experts on gaslighting. The goal of those who engage this tactic is to erase everyone' s memory of history. I'm reminded of a Star Trek: TNG episode in which a captured Captain Picard is tortured by the Cardassians. Four blinding lights are flipped on by his tormentor, Gul Madred, who demands that Picard claim that there are five lights. Five! Not four! Picard holds his ground to the end. There are four lights!

We have Cardassians among us now. Americans insisting that those who read novels or essays written by Toni Morrison or who have read speeches by Frederick Douglass should move on. Racism is post ! Over! They have, of course! They'll notice I'm that kind of black, as they say, but then pretend to ignore my blackness, demanding that I too ignore my heritage and accept a narrative, which claims nothing has happened to me or my ancestors. At least, not by white Americans.

Nothing has ever happened, and nothing is happening now ! And there are five lights !

I often leave the Gul Madreds wondering if they were successful or not.

More than a few people try to convince me that my experience is of no value to society. No value even to myself. Education focusing on structural racism in the US or white supremacist ideology employed by authoritarians and fascists is evidence of the poor decisions I made in my life. There must be something wrong with me. Who wants to hear anything from someone still hung up about the past?

Everyone would be better off if people like me would just go away!

For the authoritarians, America is in the dark ages now. Under a liberal or progressive thumb. But a new America is on the horizon, one that is without blemish. A mythical whitewashing of the past. But no less wished-for, as evident of some many Americans committed to the belief that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

How is a country such as the US, founded through the conquest of indigenous, enriched by the forced labor of Africans, kidnapped and chained, pursuing democracy in this era of trumpism, as if the constraints (such as book banning) imposed on us by authoritarians and outright fascists is normal? Because we must ask ourselves, what is normal about the erasing the evidence of fascism in American history? Most important, how are future generations to even know how to resist the tyranny of authoritarians and fascists if, included in the erasure of history, is that history of resistance?

How will future generation remain committed to the truth, and, with conviction, state that obvious. In other words, that there are four lights!

Is this America's goal-- to forget?

*

But what we are to forget isn't just dates and events. Much more is at stake when a systemic campaign is organized to erase history.

I have to admit that when I began reading Professor Jason Stanley's Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, I felt as if I were experiencing a homecoming, albeit not one that is celebratory. This one would require more reflection on a past that feels as if it never really passed us by.

We've all been here! We live here! Americans, that is. More and more scholars, of whatever race, are coming to the realization that some of us experience fascism here at home because we have always experienced fascism in the past. Or, rather, fascism has been a continuum in this world. Black Americans aren't the only people forced to labor in fields and in homes of plantation owners. The lack of healthcare, education, decent housing, the lose of women's right to their own bodily autonomy, subject to routinely being raped to increase someone's wealth or to satisfy someone's sadistic pleasure, is present today in Palestine.

There is no shortest of fascists because many in the world, including the US, are addressing democracy's acknowledgment of a multi-racial, that is, equitable inclusion, as if confronted by an invasion of a foreign body in one that is free of impurities. That we are all human beings, and not foreign bodies, is something fascists refuse to acknowledge.

I wasn't born in the South, but I recall hearing stories from neighbors on the Southside of Chicago. I volunteered to write articles for tenants living in Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago, and I recall sitting in living rooms and listening to older blacks talk about life in Mississippi or Alabama. And yet, after spending years studying slave narratives and reading history on the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras, I now believe, in the 21^st century, that slavery wasn't so bad since many of us learned valuable skills!

Who can deny that in reality the peculiar institution of slavery was authoritarian, and the subsequent years since Reconstruction were adherent to the ideology of fascism?

"One lesson that the past century taught us is that authoritarian regimes often find history profoundly threatening." writes Stanley.

Such regimes, Stanley continues, deny "multiple perspectives on the past". Only the perspective of the conqueror or enslaver matters. Only their history, free of the violence of conquest and enslavement, is the truth pitted, against the "fake". It's as if, Stanley states, "authoritarianism is antithetical to democracy", which, after all, a "shared reality".

Black history is American history. It's the history of resistance to tyranny. The history of fascism in America, I would argue. What other race in this nation has experienced what African Americans have experienced? Start with the enterprise of slave capturing and trading, to the auction block, the separation of families, to the forced brutal labor on plantations.

The beneficiaries included anyone who wasn't enslaved! The beneficiaries of Jim Crow, the lynching of blacks, the burning of homes and whole towns, schools and churches, collectively announced to black Americans that they would always be the target of authoritarian rule, even after emancipation and the exodus of blacks from the plantation.

What is the motivation for the death of George Floyd? For Trayvon Martin, Sonya, and countless others? What's behind the statement that Kamala Harris was born mentally ill?

We, a people, who fought for a definition of freedom that includes democracy and equity, who fought to make those words become reality, are still asked to forego any talk of history. To be silent on race is to be silent on ways in which we fought this injustice.

In lived experiences lies the possibility, writes Stanley, of "reclaiming lost perspectives". It is a war for the preservation of an idea. A flawed idea, but one in which the authoritarians feel compelled to pursue: only one race is superior. One race should have the power to control the world. Childish. Reminds me of all those 1950s and 1960s programs about men pursuing the power to rule the world.

No other perspective is tolerated; therefore, humanity will suffer.

*

But it's difficult to erase those other perspectives.

"When authoritarians attempt to erase history, they do so through education, by purging certain narratives from the curricula taught in schools and perhaps by forbidding their telling at home." Stanley continues, "their legacies is written into the bones of generations. In this simple fact lies always the possibility of reclaiming lost perspectives."

This too shall pass. In other words, these banning of books campaigns, this effort to subvert any memory of the past, will pass. The purging of "shared reality" maybe replaced with an "authoritarian" approved narrative. But for how long?

I think now of my parents and grandparents. How their silence taught me! Forced to discover what was being repressed, covered up, silenced, in the representation of my immediate ancestors, I sought knowledge about the ancestors who built this country.

Toni Morrison, in an essay entitled, "The Foreigner's Home", argues that for authoritarians, "truly democratic agendas" are "terror". Educational institutions, in a society pursuing democracy, are supposed to be sites where the "foreign", that is, black, indigenous, immigrant, LGTBQ, Palestinian, are shown to be human because they are! We are! Understanding replaces terror of the Other, labeled "foreign".

On the other hand, replacing those sites of education with ones engaging in strategies to purge difference is the goal of authoritarian regimes. In these so-called "educational" institutions, producing, as Morrison writes, "the perfect capitalist, one who is willing to kill a human being for a product (a pair of sneakers, a jacket, a car) or kill generations for control of products (oil, drugs, fruit, gold)," is preferable to educational sites guided by the ideas of equity and freedom.

As Stanley explains, an authoritarian-ruled education system would plant in the minds of learners a mythical past. Whites always ruled in that past, in which whites, and whites only, always were superior, and, therefore, rulers. Under an authoritarian regime, students learn that to divide people between "us" and "them" is as natural as the rising of the sun. It's a legacy embedded in the fabric of this nation.

It's a legacy in which the ideology of democracy is challenged and demands the rise of protest-- that is, in itself, a memory of resistance.

While, as Stanley writes, the erasure of certain kinds of knowledge "is conducive of authoritarian systems", it's the memory of history that fascist fear the most. The history, that is, of resistance. Fear, then, "is a possibility cynically exploited in fascist politics". To resist is futile! Dangerous! Unpatriotic!

"It's not possible not possible to teach the history of what happened to black Americans without teaching about structural racism," writes Stanley. The study of "practices, structures, and institutions that shape them." The resistance, in turn, to these practices, structures, and institutions. Structural practices and institutions play host to more than a haunting of violence against Indigenous or blacks. I remember the blacklisting for making students feel "uncomfortable". But I also remember ancestors, immediate and distant. In my mind's eye, I see them refusing to accept the "comfortable". The status quo.

In other words, memories of resistance are triggered. I doubt if my ancestors thought of their enslavement as a means of learning a skill!

An honest account of history, writes Stanley, is not whitewashed with images of "a past rooted" in "a glorious past". Sitting alongside these images will be the reality, the "shared reality", of resistance to gaslighting. To fascism.

Without a study of structural racism and resistance, history is open to "manipulation by fascist politics". To silence the past, the subject of slavery or Jim Crow or the Civil Rights era, then, is to claim, as Stanley states, that "nothing needs to be done about" racism or the ideology of white supremacy. Teachers at such institutions will need to "embrace patriotic values" when a new "credentialing body" is put in place. No more "radicals, zealots, and Marxists" at the Federal Department of Education. Ultimately, writes Stanley, the goal of an authoritarian regime is to "justify a take over of the institutions, transforming them into weapons in the war against the very idea of multi-racial democracy".

Fascism will be freedom from the constraints of a democratic society! Unknowingly, newly captive students will becomes enslaved to these authoritarian educational sites and will learn to think on the resisters, activists or those blacks, indigenous, Latino/as, Palestinians who reach a "position of power", as fakes. "Foreign" invaders, "undeserving" of their positions. Or their lives!

Under a fascist regime, it will seem as if a cacophony of opinions is allowed to enter the public sphere, each, Stanley writes, given "serious time for consideration". But these opinions are far from informed opinions! These opinions, he adds, "doesn't result" in a process that is conductive to knowledge formation via deliberation.

In fact, as Stanley writes in How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, opinions without evidence or informed by a shared body of knowledge "destroys" the very "possibility" of a shared body of knowledge. "As the common understanding of reality crumbles, fascist politics makes room for dangerous and false beliefs to take root."

Such a future would be a nightmare for all Americans because we will be faced with a whitewashed vision ahead of us. What could we possible see in this dystopian future?

Nonetheless, there will be memory. Memory of resistance! A memory of the fight for democracy.